Ha Jinpseudonym of Xuefei Jin ( born Feb. 21, 1956 , Jinzhou, Liaoning province, ChinaChinese American writer . He joined the Chinese army at age 14. He moved to the United States and entered Brandeis University in 1985. He received a doctorate there in 1992 and subsequently taught at Emory University, Boston University, and elsewhere. His book of stories who used plain, unadorned English prose to explore the tension between the individual and the family, the modern and the traditional, and personal feelings and duty.

Jin had only a brief, incomplete education before the schools in China closed in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. At age 14 he joined the army, and he served for some five years. He later worked as a railway telegraph operator and began to learn English by listening to the radio. When Chinese schools reopened in the late 1970s, he attended Heilongjiang University in Harbin, from which he graduated with a degree (1981) in English. Jin earned a master’s degree (1984) in American literature from Shandong University in Qingdao and the next year enrolled at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. (Ph.D., 1992). After the Chinese government’s suppression of the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Jin elected to remain in the United States. He entered the Creative Writing Program at Boston University in 1991 and later taught creative writing at Emory University (1993–2002) and for the China and the World Program (2002– ), a fellowship program created by Princeton and Harvard universities.

Jin’s first published books were the poetry collections Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996). His volume of army stories, Ocean of Words (1996), received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1997, and his second book of stories, Under the Red Flag (1997)

concerns

, which told of life during the Cultural Revolution

. His novel Waiting (1999), about Chinese society, won a National Book Award, as well as the 2000

, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In his first full-length novel, Waiting (2000), he recounted the story of a Chinese doctor who was forced to wait the prescribed 18 years before he could obtain a divorce and marry another woman. A critical and commercial success, it won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Jin won the same awards for War Trash (2004), becoming the third writer (after Philip Roth and John Edgar Wideman) to twice receive the PEN/Faulkner Award for

fiction. He also published poetry and short stories

Fiction. War Trash recounts the struggles of a Chinese soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Korean War. Jin’s other works include the novella In the Pond (1998) and the novels The Crazed (2002) and A Free Life (2007), which centres on a Chinese family struggling to adjust to life in the United States.